If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were tobegin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought!

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.

There are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes.

What means the fact--which is so common, so universal--that some soul that has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listening soul an infinite confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair?

You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body

Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers.